Sunday, April 27, 2008

Talent Management Vendors Get Social

Quite a lot is already said on the power of social networks to promote employee collaboration in a enterprise. As employee life cycle in a enterprise starts with on-boarding, the employee social network process has a natural fit in HRIS/Talent Management context. On corollary most of these vendor offerings are built around employee profile application. It would be quite interesting to see what some of big Talent Management players are doing in this area.

1. SAPMotivated by the internal success of social networks from Harmony, SAP is expected to soon rollout these capabilities into it's portal and HCM/Talent Management customer offerings, per Dan Farber.

SAP internalizes social networking for business “SAP doesn't yet offer Web 2.0-style social networking capabilities in its solutions that tap into the wisdom of employees, partners and customers, but it has an internal service, called Harmony. Dennis Moore, general manager of emerging systems, called it a "MySpace for the enterprise," speaking at SAP Sapphire in Atlanta. It starts with SAP employee profiles in the HR system, which serve as a foundation for connecting employees professional and personal interests. It started out as a a network for the top talent group of employees. Now it is expanded to all employees. We are getting better as drinking our own champagne"

2. OracleAfter getting the gist of internal social networks with AppsLab, I believe Oracle has enough reasons to integrate this value into their next generation of Fusion HCM offerings.

Oracle Gets Social“So we set out on this path to understand social networking behind the firewall. Last Friday we launched our first social application. It was a basic directory application with employee names, titles, emails and phone numbers. That’s about it. Rich built it in just a few weeks. The only differentiating feature from our current corporate directory, was that we allowed employees to request other employees to “join their network”. To “launch” our Alpha, I sent an email to a group of a few hundred people inside Oracle. In the first hour of operation we went from 3 users (Jake, Rich, and I) to over 270 users. After 10hrs we were nearing 2,000 users and today we hit 10,000, just over 1/7th of the entire organization”

3. SuccessFactorsSuccessFactors Unveils Employee Profile“ By combining the interactivity, ease of use and connectedness of a social network with highly valuable, contextual performance data, Employee Profile delivers an addictive, highly valuable solution that takes the concept of an employee directory to a far more meaningful and strategic level. For managers and executives, Employee Profile provides a powerful new way to understand and gain insight into the talents, interests and potential of employees throughout an organization. Armed with greater visibility into a company's talent pool, managers are able to make smarter decisions in how they recruit, form teams to solve business problems and tackle new challenges.”

With the internal social success of Oracle and SAP providing enough motivation for customers to go social, we can expect to see other niche Talent Management players to get on to the social wagon soon.

You are right that social has a lot of value for Talent solutions. I expect you will find several kindred spirits over at TalentedApps who share your belief that this is one interesting trend for strategic HR.